My name is Tanya Kalmanovitch. I am a violist, a fiddle player, and a writer. Tar Sands Songbook is a performed reckoning with my hometown of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada — an oil boom-town located in the Athabasca Oil Sands, the largest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world. When I was fourteen years old, I decided to become a professional musician because music had nothing to do with oil. The morning after my last day of high school, I moved from Alberta, Canada to New York City. It’s taken me until now to see that the things I imagined to be separate—oil and music, remote northern towns and the capitals of the world—are in fact closely intertwined.